Alexander the Great's Father Found — Maybe

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A decades-old mystery about the body of Alexander the Great's
father has been solved, anthropologists claim.

A new analysis of bones from a Macedonian tomb complex reveals a
skeleton with a knee injury so severe that it would have caused a
noticeable limp in life. This injury matches some historical
records of one sustained by Philip II, whose nascent empire
Alexander
the Great would expand all the way to India.

The skeleton in question, however, is not the one initially
thought to be Philip II's — instead, it comes from the tomb next
door. The skeletons are the subject of an entrenched debate among
experts on ancient Greece and Macedonia. While some praised the
new study, others pushed back, suggesting the new research will
not quell 40 years of controversy.

"This publication in PNAS is incorrect," said Theodore Antikas, a
researcher at Aristotle University in Greece and author of
another controversial study on bones from the tombs.

A violent history

The story of
Philip II is wrought with twists and turns. In 336 B.C., the
king was murdered by one of his bodyguards. The motives for the
assassination are unclear. Some ancient historians wrote that the
murder was an act of revenge stemming from a
sordid tale of suicide and sexual assault between Philip II's
male lovers and other members of the court.

Whatever the cause, murder was de rigueur for the
Macedonian royal family. Within days of Philip II's murder, one
of his wives, Olympias — mother of Alexander the Great — let
her own homicidal tendencies run free. According to the Latin
historian Justin, Olympias killed the newborn daughter of Philip
II's newest wife, Cleopatra, in her mother's arms. She then
forced Cleopatra to hang herself.

A generation later, after the
death of Alexander the Great, the conqueror's half-brother
Philip III Arrhidaeus (also spelled Arrhidaios) took the throne.
Philip III Arrhidaeus was king in name only, and ancient
historians record him as being mentally unfit. His wife,
Eurydice, was a warrior, however. She was determined to make her
husband more than a figurehead puppet for Alexander's generals,
who were by this time vying for power in the void left by his
death.

But Philip III Arrhidaeus and Eurydice would lose that battle. In
317 B.C., Olympias came out against them. The couple's troops
refused to fight the forces of the mother of Alexander the Great.
Olympias had the pair killed and buried. Some months later, they
were exhumed and cremated in a display to shore up legitimacy for
the next king. [ Family
Ties: 8 Truly Dysfunctional Royal Families ]

Cremation and controversy

Philip II. Cleopatra. Philip III. Eurydice.

When archaeologists uncovered a Macedonian tomb complex near the
Greek city of Vergina in the 1970s, they knew they had royal
burials on their hands. But which tombs belonged to which royals?

There are three tombs at the site. Tomb I had been plundered in
antiquity but contained human remains and an intricate wall
painting of the Rape of Persephone. Tomb II was intact. Inside
were the cremated bones of a man and a woman, surrounded by armor
and other lavish items. Tomb III is widely accepted to belong to
Alexander IV, Alexander the Great's son.

Initially, the bodies in
lavish Tomb II were identified as those of Philip II and
Cleopatra. But
debate has raged over possible injuries to the male skull,
over the ages and dating of the skeletons, and over whether the
bones were burned with flesh on or off. (As Philip III Arridaeus
was cremated long after burial, archaeologists looked for signs
that the bones had been burned after the flesh had rotted away.)
Many archaeologists suspected the two burned bodies were not
Philip II and Cleopatra, but Philip III and Eurydice.

The two sides have been lobbing research papers at each other for
years, but seemed at an impasse.

"In fact, the issue has become eminently political, and for years
a sort of vendetta has been raging between factions," said
historian Miltiades Hatzopoulos of International Hellenic
University, who was not involved in the new research.

Now, Antonis Bartsiokas of Democritus University of Thrace in
Greece has taken a different tact. Instead of examining
the burnt bones in Tomb II, he and his team took a close look
at three skeletons from the tomb next door.

The analysis revealed that the man in Tomb I was in his 40s when
he died, and stood 5 feet 9 inches tall (180 centimeters) —
impressive for the era. The woman died around 18 years of age,
based on measurements of the fusion of her bones. She was about 5
feet 4 inches tall (165 cm). The baby was a newborn, probably
only a week to three weeks past the due date.

The ages match historical records of Philip II, Cleopatra and
their infant. But the real smoking gun, Liston said, was a knee
injury on the male skeleton.

The man's left thigh bone, or femur, had fused with one of his
lower leg bones, the tibia. This fusion left the knee joint
frozen in place at a 79-degree angle. A hole in the bone suggests
the wound was caused by a penetrating injury from a projectile,
such as a spear.

And that's where things get exciting. According to historical
records, Philip II was injured in the leg during a battle in 345
B.C. He then limped for the rest of his life.

"When I found the femur fused to the tibia at the knee joint, I
suddenly remembered the leg injury of Philip, but I could not
recall any details," Bartsiokas told Live Science. "I then ran to
study the historical evidence."

The injury does match descriptions of Philip II's limp, the
University of Waterloo's Liston said.

"This was a devastating injury that separated the knee joint and
left it probably completely unstable until it fused," Liston told
Live Science. The pain would have been excruciating, she said.

After reading the new PNAS paper, she said, she asked two
middle-age men at her lab in Athens to stand on one foot, with
the toes of the other foot just touching the ground. The angles
of their knees were 72 degrees and 80 degrees. This ad hoc
experiment suggests that, like Philip II, the man in the tomb
could have walked, but only with difficulty. He probably could
have ridden a horse — but he may have been vulnerable in
hand-to-hand combat.

"This injury may also explain why Philip, a skilled warrior, was
so utterly unable to fight off the assassins," Liston said. "With
this knee, he would have limited mobility and very poor balance."

An end to controversy?

If Philip II and his wife and baby occupy Tomb I, it stands to
reason that Philip III and his wife are the contested skeletons
in Tomb II, Bartsiokas and his colleagues write today (July 20)
in PNAS. [ See
Images of the Tomb II and Bones Inside ]

Whether the finding will rewrite history remains to be seen. The
museum at the site of the Royal Tombs of Vergina identifies Tomb
II, not Tomb I, as belonging to Philip II. So does UNESCO, which
classifies the monuments as a royal heritage site.

"These are bold claims that I don't think will be very welcome in
certain quarters in Greece," said Jonathan Musgrave, an anatomist
at the University of Bristol, who has argued that the bones in
Tomb II belong to Philip II and Cleopatra.

Indeed, researchers who have argued for Tomb II as Philip II's
final resting place were not quickly convinced by the new study.
In 2014, two bags of human and animal bones were found in a
storage area with plaster from Tomb I, Antikas told Live Science.
He and his team have analyzed those bones, he said, and found
that Tomb I contained not two adults and a baby as discussed in
Bartsiokas' new paper, but two adults, a teenager, a fetus and
three newborns. Those findings have yet to be published in a
peer-reviewed journal, pending permission for further study from
Greece's Central Archaeological Council, Antikas said.

"Any prejudgment concerning the occupants is impossible before
the complete context is re-examined," said Chrysoula Paliadeli,
an archaeologist at the director of the Aristotle University
excavations at Vergina.

Even the "smoking gun" leg wound falls under scrutiny; ancient
historians were not always very detailed or clear with their
sourcing. Bartsiokas and his team trust the writings of
Demosthenes, a contemporary of Philip II, who simply wrote that
the king was wounded in his leg. But 300 years later historian
Didymos wrote that Philip's wound was in his right thigh, said
Hatzopoulos of International Hellenic University. The wound on
the skeleton analyzed by Bartsiokas was on the left leg.

It might seem natural to trust the historian who was writing at
the time of Philip II's life versus the one writing 300 years
later, but Didymos' source was probably Theopompos, who did live
at the same time as Philip II, Hatzopoulos said.

"Having followed this controversy through four decades I have
come to the conclusion that in this particular issue one cannot
put much faith in the so-called 'exact sciences,'" Hatzopoulos
said. "Reputed scientists have contradicted one another time and
time again."

Bartsiokas and his team seemed prepared for ongoing strife.

"I think that we have made a very strong case," said study
co-author Juan-Luis Arsuaga of the Universidad Complutense de
Madrid. "Now the focus of attention will turn to Tomb I. I am
open to debate."